The Looming Tower (45 page)

‘Owhali abruptly faced a moral choice that he believed would determine his eternal fate—at least, that was what he later told an FBI agent. He had expected to be a martyr; his death in the operation would assure him his immediate place in Paradise. But he realized that his mission of setting off the stun grenade had already been accomplished. If he were to go forward to his own certain death, that would be suicide, he explained, not martyrdom. Damnation would be his fate, not salvation. Such is the narrow bridge between heaven and hell. To save his soul, ‘Owhali turned and ran, failing in his main task of raising the drop bar so that the truck could get closer to the building.

‘Owhali didn’t get far. The blast knocked him to the sidewalk, shredding his clothes and pounding shrapnel into his back. When he managed to stand, in the weird silence after the blast, he could see the results of his handiwork.

The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi Building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. Many were pinned under the rubble, and soon their cries arose in a chorus of fear and pain that would go on for days, until they were rescued or silenced by death. The toll was 213 dead, including 12 Americans;
4,500
were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days.

Nine minutes later, Ahmed the German drove his truck into the parking lot of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam and pushed the detonator wired into the dashboard. Fortuitously, between him and the embassy there was a water tanker truck. It was blown three stories high and came to rest against the chancery of the embassy, but it prevented the bomber from getting close enough to bring the building down. The toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded, all of them Africans.

Beyond the obvious goal of calling attention to the existence of al-Qaeda, the point of the bombings was vague and confusing. The Nairobi operation was named after the Holy Kaaba in Mecca; the Dar es Salaam bombing was called Operation al-Aqsa, after the mosque in Jerusalem; neither had an obvious connection to the American embassies in Africa. Bin Laden put forward several explanations for the attack. He initially said that the sites had been targeted because of the “invasion” of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies.

Muslims all over the world greeted the bombings with horror and dismay. The deaths of so many people, most of them Africans, many of them Muslims, created a furor. Bin Laden said that the bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experienced. But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.

But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders, and bin Laden caught America at a vulnerable and unfortunate moment in its history.

“NOW IT BEGINS,”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald told Coleman when the news of the bombings came. It was 3:30 in the morning in New York when he called. Coleman got out of bed and drove immediately to Washington. Two days later his wife met him at a Dairy Queen on I-95 to drop off his medicine and a change of clothes. She knew he would be at SIOC for a long time.

FBI headquarters assigned the embassy bombings case to the Washington field office, which normally handles overseas investigations. O’Neill passionately wanted control. New York had a sealed indictment of bin Laden, which gave that office the right to claim the case if he indeed was behind it; but bin Laden was still obscure, even in the upper reaches of the FBI, and the term “al-Qaeda” was almost unknown. Several possible perpetrators were under discussion, Hezbollah and Hamas among them. O’Neill had to prove to his own bureau that bin Laden was the prime mover.

He snatched a young Lebanese American agent named Ali Soufan from another squad. Soufan was the only FBI agent in New York who actually spoke Arabic, and one of eight in the entire country. On his own, he had studied bin Laden’s fatwas and interviews, so when a claim of responsibility was sent to several press organizations the same day of the bombing from a group no one had ever heard of before, Soufan immediately recognized bin Laden as the author. The language was exactly the same as in his previous declarations. Thanks to Soufan, O’Neill was able to send a teletype to headquarters the very day of the bombing outlining the damning similarities between bin Laden’s past statements and the demands expressed in the pseudonymous claim.

Thomas Pickard, then head of the criminal division at headquarters, was temporarily in charge of the bureau while Director Freeh was on vacation. He spurned O’Neill’s request to give the New York office control of the investigation. Pickard wanted to keep the probe under the supervision of the Washington office, which he formerly headed. O’Neill frantically enlisted every powerful contact he could, including Attorney General Reno and his friend Dick Clarke. Eventually, the bureau bowed to the strong-arm pressure that this subordinate was able to apply, but as punishment O’Neill was not allowed to go to Kenya personally to oversee the investigation. The bruises left by this internecine conflict would never heal.

Only eight hours after the bombings, dozens of FBI investigators were on their way to Kenya. Eventually, almost five hundred would be working the two cases in Africa, the largest deployment in the history of the bureau. On the way into Nairobi, the airport bus carrying the agents stopped for a Masai tribesman herding his cattle across the road. The agents stared at the congested streets, crammed with bicycles and donkey carts, dizzying scenes that were at once beautiful, exotic, and full of shocking poverty. Many of the agents were unfamiliar with the world beyond America; indeed, some had not even been given passports until the day of their departure, and here they were, nine thousand miles away. They knew little about the laws and customs of the countries they were working in. They were anxious and watchful, knowing that they were now likely targets of al-Qaeda as well.

Stephen Gaudin, a stocky redhead from the North End of Boston, took out his short-stock machine gun and placed it on his lap. Until recently, his FBI career had been spent in a two-person office in upstate New York above a Dunkin’ Donuts. He had never heard of al-Qaeda. He had been brought along to provide protection, but he was staggered by the immense number of people surrounding the embassy. They dwarfed any crowd he had ever seen. Nothing looked familiar to him. How could he protect the other agents when he had no idea what was going on?

The bus dropped them off in front of the smoldering ruins of the embassy. The scale of devastation was overwhelming. The building was gutted from one end to the other; next door, the Kenyan secretarial school was completely flattened. Rescuers were digging into the rubble with their bare hands, trying to reach the wounded. Steve Gaudin gaped at the ruins and wondered, “What the hell are we going to do?” The FBI had never solved an overseas bombing.

One of the people buried under the secretarial school was named Roselyn Wanjiku Mwangi—Rosie, as everyone called her. The rescuers could hear her talking to another victim whose leg was crushed, trying to keep his spirits up. For two days Rosie’s encouraging voice inspired the rescuers, who worked relentlessly. Finally they reached the man with the crushed leg and carefully worked him free of the debris. They promised Rosie they would have her loose in less than two hours, but when they finally did reach her, it was too late. Her death was a heartbreaking blow to the exhausted workers.

The bombings were an audacious assault on America’s place in the world. The level of coordination and technical sophistication required to carry out nearly simultaneous explosions was surprising, but more troubling was the willingness of al-Qaeda to escalate the level of violence. The FBI eventually discovered that five American embassies had been targeted—luck and better intelligence had saved the other three. The investigators were stunned to learn that nearly a year earlier an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda had walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and told the CIA about the bombing plot. The agency had dismissed this intelligence as unreliable. This was not an isolated incident. All through the spring there had been a drumroll of threats and fatwas from bin Laden, but few had taken them seriously. Now the consequence of that neglect was starkly evident.

T
HREE DAYS AFTER THE BOMBING,
Steve Gaudin’s chief, Pat D’Amuro, told him to check out a lead. “There’s a guy in a hotel outside of Nairobi,” said D’Amuro. “He doesn’t fit in.”

“That’s it?” Gaudin asked. “He doesn’t ‘fit in’? What does that mean?”

“If you don’t like it, I got a hundred other leads,” said D’Amuro.

Gaudin and a couple of other agents drove to a shantytown largely inhabited by Somali refugees. Their truck inched along through a staring crowd and stopped in front of a decrepit hotel. “Whatever you do, don’t get out of the truck,” their Kenyan colleague warned. “They hate Americans here.”

While the agents nervously waited for the Kenyan cop to return, a man in the crowd leaned against the truck with his back to the window. “I told you not to come here,” he said under his breath. “You’re going to get killed.”

Gaudin guessed the man was the tipster. “Can you help us?” he asked.

“He’s not here,” the man hissed. “He’s in another hotel.”

At the next hotel, the agents found a man who didn’t fit in: a slender young Arab with several jagged stitches on his forehead and bandages on his hands that were leaking blood. He identified himself as Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed from Yemen. He said he was in the country researching business opportunities—he was a nut merchant—and that he had stopped at a bank near the embassy when the “accident” happened. The only items in his pocket were eight brand-new hundred-dollar bills.

“How did you wind up at this hotel?” the interrogator asked.

Bin Rasheed said that when he got out of the hospital, a cab driver took him there, knowing that he didn’t speak Swahili. It was a place where Arabs sometimes stayed.

“Where are the rest of your things—your clothes, your identification documents?”

“Everything was lost in the explosion,” bin Rasheed explained. “These are the clothes I was wearing that day.”

As Gaudin listened to the young Arab responding to the American interrogators, he thought the story was plausible. It wasn’t Gaudin’s place to ask questions; more experienced agents handled that. Still, Gaudin noticed that bin Rasheed’s clothes were a lot neater than his own. Although Gaudin had been in the country only a couple of days, he was rumpled and coated in dust; and yet bin Rasheed, who claimed to have lost everything in a catastrophic bombing, looked comparatively spiffy. But why would he lie about his clothes?

Gaudin couldn’t sleep that night, he was so troubled by an improbable thought that played in his mind. The next morning when the investigation resumed, Gaudin asked the lead interrogator if he could ask a couple of questions. “I spent six years in the army,” he told bin Rasheed. He said that he had gone through specialized training in counterinterrogation techniques at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. It had been a brutal experience. Soldiers learned what to expect if they were ever taken prisoner. They were beaten and intimidated; they were also coached on how to tell a convincing cover story. “I think you got the same training,” Gaudin asserted. “Now, if you remember your instruction, when you lie you must tell a single logical story. But you made a mistake. You said one thing that was illogical.”

Instead of laughing in disbelief, bin Rasheed pulled his chair closer. “Where was I illogical?” he asked.

“Here’s where your story falls apart,” said Gaudin, who was staring pointedly at bin Rasheed’s shoes, which were scuffed and filthy like Gaudin’s own. “You got cuts on both hands, but there’s not a drop of blood on your green denim pants. In fact, you’re perfectly clean.”

“Arab men are much cleaner than American men,” bin Rasheed responded.

“I’ll give you that,” said Gaudin, still staring at his shoes. “And maybe you’ve got a magic soap that gets the blood out of your clothes.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got a gash on your back as well. I suppose there was some way a piece of glass fell from a building and went down your shirt without tearing it.”

“Anything is possible,” said bin Rasheed.

“I’ll give you that, too. Then you wash your bloody shirt with your magic soap and it looks like new. But there are two things you don’t wash.”

Bin Rasheed followed Gaudin’s stare. “Of course, I don’t wash my shoes!”